by Bruno, Joe
Schultz had one simple rule that helped propel him to the top: if someone stole a dime of his cash, that person would soon die. His longtime lawyer, J. Richard “Dixie” Davis, Schultz's conduit to the crooked politicians who protected Schultz's flank, once said, “You can insult Arthur's girl. Spit in his face. Push him around. And he'll laugh. But don't steal a dollar from his accounts. If you do, you're dead.”
Two such men, who were deposited into the hereafter by Schultz, were Vincent “Mad Dog” Cole and Jack “Legs” Diamond. After Schultz's men pumped several bullets into Diamond's head in an upstate hotel, Schultz said, “Just another punk caught with his hands in my pocket.”
The killings of Diamond and Cole propelled Schultz into the big time, and soon he became an equal in a syndicate of gangsters, which included Lucky Luciano, Louie “Lepke” Buchalter, Meyer Lansky, Albert Anastasia, and Joe “Adonis” Doto. While the rest of the crew were immaculate dressers, Schultz dressed one step above a Bowery bum. Even though he was raking in millions, Schultz never spent more than $35 for a suit, or $2 for a shirt.
Lucky Luciano once said of Schultz, “Dutch was the cheapest guy I ever knew. The guy had a couple of million bucks, and he dressed like a pig.”
As for his insistence on not dressing up to his mob stature, Schultz said, “I think only queers wear silk shirts.”
As time passed, the rest of the syndicate grew weary of Schultz's erratic ways. One such example of his lunacy was when Schultz, in order to beat a tax-evasion case in upstate Malone, New York, converted to Catholicism in order to butter up the all-Catholic jury. His scheme worked, and Schultz was acquitted on all counts.
Another time, at a syndicate meeting, Schultz became upset over a wisecrack Joe Adonis made about Schultz's chintzy clothes. Schultz, who had a bad case of the flu, grabbed Adonis in a headlock, and he blew hard into his face.
“See you (expletive) star. Now you've got the flu too.”
Adonis did indeed catch the flu from Schultz, which did not make him and the rest of the syndicate particularly happy.
Schultz's downfall was his insistence that the syndicate kill New York City Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who was on a mission to crack down on all the mobs, especially Schultz's. Schultz called a meeting of the nine-member syndicate, and he demanded Dewey's head on a plate. The other members thought killing Dewey was a terrible idea, because they were convinced, if Dewey was offed, an avalanche of criminal investigations would surely fall down on their heads. Schultz's proposal was voted down 8-1.
Schultz stormed from the meeting, saying, “I still say he ought to be hit. And if nobody else is going to do it, I'm gonna hit him myself. Within 48 hours.”
The other syndicate members, knowing Schultz was not one to bluff, immediately voted unanimously that Schultz was the one who had to go; and quickly, before Dewey was dead.
On October 23, 1935, the day following the fateful votes, Schultz, Berman, Lulu Rosenkrantz, and Abe Landau were in the Palace Chop House and Tavern in Newark, New Jersey, ostensibly to discuss how best to do away with Dewey. Schultz was in the bathroom, when Charlie “The Bug” Workman and Mendy Weiss slipped quietly through the front door.
With Weiss standing guard outside the bathroom door, Workman quietly entered the bathroom, looking for possible witnesses. Instead, he found a started Schultz just zipping up his pants. Workman plugged Schultz once, right in the middle of the chest. Satisfied Schultz was dead, Workman and Weiss rushed into the main dining room, and they shot numerous holes into Berman, Rosenkrantz, and Landau, killing all three men.
Schultz was rushed to the hospital, and he lay delirious for two days. While lying in his hospital deathbed, Schultz spouted such idiocies as: Oh Duckie, see we skipped again. And, Please mother, crack down on the Chinaman's friends and Hitler's commander. And, Louie, didn't I give you my doorbell?
Schultz's temperature rose to 106 degrees, and on October 25 he fell into a coma and died. His former pals in the syndicate, overjoyed and more than little relieved, divided Schultz's prosperous operations equally amongst themselves.
Siegel, Benjamin (Bugsy)
Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel is the man most responsible for the birth of the city of Las Vegas, which became the gambling capital of the world.
Siegel was born Benjamin Siegelbaum on February 28, 1906, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. As a teenager, Siegel crossed the bridge to Manhattan, and he started a gang on Lafayette Street, which skirted the border of Little Italy, with another thug named Moe Sedway. Their main racket was shaking down pushcart owners for protection money, and if they weren't paid quickly enough, they burnt down the poor owners' pushcarts.
Soon, Siegel teamed up with Meyer Lansky, the man who would shape his life, and eventually, his death. Together they formed the “Bugs and Meyer Gang,” which started out in auto theft and ended up handling hit contracts for bootleggers, who were having their shipments hijacked. This tidy little killing business was the forerunner to the infamous “Murder Incorporated,” which handled hundreds of contract killings during the 1930's.
In the late 1920's, Siegel and Lansky hooked up with ambitious Italian mobsters Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese, Joe Bonanno, Albert Anastasia, and Tommy Lucchese. Together they formed a National Crime Commission, which controlled all organized crime in America, for many years to come. Siegel was the main hitman for the group, and in 1931, he led the four-man hit-squad which riddled Joe “The Boss” Masseria's body with bullets in a Coney Island Restaurant. Siegel developed the reputation as a man who not only killed frequently, but enjoyed killing, with the glee of a schoolboy on his first date.
In the late 1930's, The Commission sent Siegel to California to take over their West Coast rackets, including the lucrative racing wire, which transmitted horse race results to thousands of bookie joints throughout the country. Siegel pushed aside West Coast mob boss Jack Dragna, who was told by Lansky and Luciano, if he didn't step down and hand the racing wire reins over to Siegel, bad things would happen to him quickly. Dragna did as he was told, and Dragna soon disappeared from the California organized crime scene.
While in Hollywood, Siegel, who was movie-star-good-looking, was a renowned ladies man, who sometimes bedded down three or four starlets at a time. He hung around with such movie hunks as Clark Cable, Gary Cooper, George Raft, and Cary Grant. The girls he bedded included Jean Harlow, Wendy Barry, Marie McDonald, Virginia Hill, and Italian Countess Dorothy DiFrasso.
Even though Siegel was busy with the broads, he always found time to do a little killing on the side. In 1939, on orders from New York City Jewish mob boss Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, Siegel whacked Harry "Big Greenie" Greenberg, who was singing like a canary to the feds. Siegel was arrested for Greenberg's murder, but after a witness conveniently disappeared, Siegel was acquitted of all charges.
The bad publicity from the Greenberg trial ruined Siegel's man-about-town reputation in Hollywood. As a result, the Commission sent Siegel to the deserts of Nevada, to scout sites for a hotel/casino they wanted to build. Siegel found the perfect location in Las Vegas, and he convinced the boys from New York City, including his pal Lansky, to invest millions of dollars in an opulent night club, Siegel dubbed “The Flamingo Hotel.”
The building of the “The Flamingo Hotel” was a disaster from the start. Siegel's insistence on only the best of everything skyrocketed the costs to a staggering $6 million, which annoyed his partners in New York City more than just a little bit. Furthermore, there were concerns that maybe Siegel was skimming a little construction money off the top, to fund his actions with the ladies.
In December 1946, the opening night of “The Flamingo Hotel” was an unmitigated disaster. Siegel had moved up the opening date from March 1947, while the hotel was still in the late stages of being built. Since “The Flamingo Hotel” did not show well (the lobby was draped with ugly drop cloths), the Hollywood crowd they had depended upon to generate business stayed away.
I
n a few short months, “The Flamingo Hotel” was more than a quarter of a million dollars in the red. Losing money on gambling was unheard of in the mob, and as a result, Siegel's partners in New York City made a business decision that Siegel's days on earth must end as soon as possible.
Contrary to what has been written in the past, longtime pal Lansky had no problem signing off on Siegel's death warrant. Lansky said that “business is business,” and Siegel was bad for business.
On June 20, 1947, Siegel was sitting on the living room couch, in the Beverly Hills home of his girlfriend Virginia Hill, reading the Los Angeles Times. Suddenly, two rifle bullets, fired from an open window, struck Siegel in the face. One bullet hit his right cheek and settled in his brain. The second hit him in the nose, then pierced his right eye.
Siegel's unseeing right eye was found on the floor, 15 feet from his lifeless body.
St. Clair, Stephanie (Madame Queenie)
She was chased out of the Harlem numbers rackets by Dutch Schultz, but when Schultz lay dying in a hospital bed from a bullet wound, Stephanie St. Clair had the last laugh.
Stephanie St. Clair was born in 1886, in Marseilles, a seaport in southern France. At 26, she emigrated to New York City, and she settled in Harlem. Almost immediately, St. Clair hooked up with the Forty Thieves, a white gang which were in existence since the 1850's. There is no record of what St. Clair did for the next 10 years, but it's safe to say, considering her ties to the Forty Thieves, a notorious shake-down gang, what she did was anything but legal.
In 1922, St. Clair used $10,000 of her own money, and she started Harlem's first numbers rackets. St. Clair was known for having a violent temper, and she often cursed at her underlings, in several languages. When people questioned St. Clair about her heritage, she snapped that she was born in “European France,” and that she spoke flawless French, unlike the French-speaking rabble from the Caribbean. In Harlem, they called her Madame St. Clair, but in the rest of the city she was known as just plain “Queenie.”
In the mid-1920's, known bootlegger and stone killer Dutch Schultz, decided he wanted to take over all the policy rackets in Harlem. Schultz did not ask St. Clair to back away too nicely, resulting in the deaths of dozens of St. Clair's numbers runners.
St. Claire enlisted the help of Bumpy Johnson, an ex-con with a hair-trigger temper, to take care of the Schultz situation. Johnson went downtown, and he visited Italian mob boss Lucky Luciano. Johnson asked Luciano to talk some sense into Schultz, before things got downright nasty. However, there was not much Luciano could do, since at the time Luciano was one of Schultz's partners in several illegal endeavors. Luciano suggested that St. Clair and Johnson throw in with Schultz, making them, in effect, a sub-division of Schultz's numbers business. This did not sit too well with St. Clair, and even though Johnson tried to convince her this was the smart move, St. Clair turned down Luciano's offer.
As a result of her refusal to buckle under to Schultz's demands, St. Clair began having trouble with the police, whom she was paying off to look the other way. This was the work of Schultz, who through his connections with Tammany Hall, had several politicians in his back pocket, as well as half of the New York City police force. While Schultz's number runners worked the streets of Harlem with impunity, St. Clair's runners, when they were not being killed by Schultz's men, were being arrested for illegal gambling.
St. Clair decided to fight back with the power of the press. In December 1930, St. Clair took several ads in Harlem newspapers, accusing the police of graft, shakedowns, and corruption. That did not go over too well with the local fuzz, and they immediately arrested St. Clair for illegal gambling. St. Clair was tried, convicted, and sentenced to eight months of hard labor on Welfare Island.
Upon her release, St. Clair appeared before the Seabury Committee, which was investigating graft in the Bronx and in the Manhattan Magistrates Courts. St. Clair testified that from 1923-1926, to protect her runners from arrest, she had paid the police in Harlem $6,000. She added that after the police took her money, they arrested her number runners anyway. Schultz had a good laugh over that one, since $6,000 was less than he paid monthly to keep the cops in New York City happy.
Nothing came from St. Clair's testimony before the Seabury Committee, so St. Clair decided to plead her case directly to New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker, who was almost as crooked as Schultz. St. Clair told Walker that Schultz was pressuring her to join his gang, or else. Walker, who was being investigated by the Seabury Committee himself, answered St. Clair by quitting his job as Mayor and relocating to Europe for the next few years, until the heat died down.
At her wit's end, St. Claire pleaded with the other black policy number bankers in Harlem to join forces with her in a battle against Schultz. Knowing that Schultz had too much juice in the government and too many shooters in his gang, the other Harlem policy bankers turned St. Clair down flat.
Bumpy Johnson soon found out that Schultz had put the word out on the streets that St. Clair was to be shot on sight. St. Clair went into hiding, refusing to even go outside to see the light of day. On one occasion, Johnson had to hide St. Clair in a coal bin, under a mound of coal, to save her from Schultz's men. That was the final straw for St. Claire. She sent word to Schultz that she would agree to his demands. Schultz sent word back to St. Clair, that she could remain alive as long as she gave Schultz a majority share of her numbers rackets. St. Clair reluctantly agreed.
Schultz had his own run of bad luck, when he demanded that Luciano and Luciano's pals, agree to the killing of Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who was breathing down Schultz's neck. Schultz's proposition was turned down flat, and when he said he would kill Dewey himself, Schultz was shot in the belly, in the bathroom of a New Jersey restaurant.
Schultz lingered in a delirious state in a hospital for a few days before he died. As Schultz was laying there mumbling inanities, a telegram arrived, saying “As ye sow, so shall you reap.”
The telegram was sent by the Queen of Harlem: Stephanie St. Clair.
Wanting to get away from all the tensions, St. Clair eventually turned over her number business to Bumpy Johnson. Not being the boss “Madame Queenie” any longer, St. Clair faded into obscurity, and she died in her sleep in 1969.
In the 1997 movie “Hoodlum,” Lawrence Fishburne played Bumpy Johnson, Tim Roth played Dutch Schultz, Andy Garcia played Lucky Luciano, and Cicely Tyson played Stephanie St. Clair.
Sullivan, Timothy (Big Tim)
“Big Tim” Sullivan was a Tammany Hall hack who gave true meaning to the term “crooked politician.”
Sullivan was born in 1863 at 25 Baxter Street, one of the worse slum buildings in New York City. At 25 Baxter Street, the squalor was so intense, in 1866, a New York Times article called it, “one of the filthiest tenements in New York City.”
Sullivan's parents had emigrated from County Kerry, Ireland, and with them being so poor, Sullivan was thrust into the streets at the age of eight, to shine shoes and sell newspapers. Being the enterprising lad that he was, Sullivan soon saved up enough cash to start his own newspaper delivery service, in which Sullivan employed dozens of poor kids from the neighborhood to do his deliveries. In a few short years, Sullivan had enough cash to purchase four local bars; the first of which he opened on Christie Street, just east of the Bowery.
One of Sullivan's bar customers was Thomas "Fatty" Walsh, a notorious ward leader in Tammany Hall. Sullivan fell under Walsh's political wing, and in 1894, Sullivan was elected to the Third District's State Assembly.
Running roughshod over the rules, Sullivan became a large cog in Tammany Hall's corrupt wheel. Soon, Sullivan was appointed the District Leader of the entire Lower East Side of Manhattan.
That was like giving a vampire the key to the blood bank.
Sullivan bridged the gap between public service and common street thuggery, by recruiting infamous gang leaders, like Paul Kelly and Monk Eastman, to do his dirty work. This work included “voter influence” at election s
ites, which basically meant their gangs beat up voters who didn't see things exactly Sullivan's way.
In return for using his influence to keep these gangsters out of jail, Sullivan got a piece of all their illegal activities in the Lower East Side, including prostitution, gambling, loan-sharking, and extortion. To keep things looking on the up-and-up, Sullivan also entrenched himself in many legal endeavors, including becoming partners in the MGM and Loews cinema operations.
In Congress, Sullivan did pioneer a couple of key pieces of legislation. In 1896, Sullivan introduced a law that made boxing legal, only to see it made illegal again in 1900 after several boxers were killed in the ring.
In 1911, Sullivan also passed the dubious “Sullivan Act” which made it illegal to carry guns, unless you could afford to pay a hefty registration fee. Needless to say, Sullivan's cronies made so much illegal dough, they all were able to cough up the cash needed to carry guns legally, in order to enforce their illegal activities. Yet, the common schmo on the street was so poor, he had no choice but to walk the mean streets of New York City without a firearm to protect himself.
In late 1911, Sullivan's evil ways finally caught up with him. Sullivan contracted syphilis, probably in one of the many prostitution houses in which he was a partner. As a result of this disease, Sullivan became paranoid and delusional. Sullivan was judged mentally incompetent, and he was removed from his seat in the Senate. In 1912, Sullivan's family placed him in a mental institution, which made his condition worse. While in the sanitarium, Sullivan complained he was being watched and that his food was being poisoned.
In 1913, while the guards were playing cards, Sullivan escaped from the sanitarium. Two weeks later, Sullivan's body was found near the railroad tracks in Pelham Parkway. It appeared, he had been hit by a freight train.
For some unknown reason, Sullivan's body was not claimed until 13 days later. The city declared him a vagrant, to be shamefully interred in a potter's field at Hart Island. As Sullivan's body was being readied for transport to Hart Island, a police officer made a final inspection of the corpse. He was astounded to discover that the dead man was, indeed, the missing Big Tim Sullivan. As a result, Big Tim was finally given a proper send-off.